Category: A.R. Ammons

1.
Why do I write, and why do I read? I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.

2.Wonderment, I tell myself earlier this year, in my journal. Every time I arrive at a page, I bring with me questions. Every time I turn to the next, I leave with more.

3.
What does it mean to be kind?

4.
There’s a lot of work to be done. I could see the road a little bit now: where I have to go, what I have to do. Really it’s more like a shadow of an arrow, saying, There. Forward. But the path is there.

Substantial PlanesA.R. Ammons

It doesn’t
matter

to me
if

poems mean
nothing:

there’s no
floor

to the
universe

and yet
one

walks the
floor.

—

This is from The Really Short Poems of A. R. Ammons, published by W. W. Norton & Company, 1992.

Am not really religious, but growing up with parents who are so, I can’t escape the desire sometimes to hold on to something much bigger than myself. This is how I pray: I peel oranges, I tie my shoelaces, and I read poems like these.

StillA.R. Ammons

I said I will find what is lowly
and put the roots of my identity
down there:
each day I’ll wake up
and find the lowly nearby,
a handy focus and reminder,
a ready measure of my significance,
the voice by which I would be heard,
the wills, the kinds of selfishness
I could
freely adopt as my own:

but though I have looked everywhere,
I can find nothing
to give myself to:
everything is

magnificent with existence, is in
surfeit of glory:
nothing is diminished,
nothing has been diminished for me:

I said what is more lowly than the grass:
ah, underneath,
a ground-crust of dry-burnt moss:
I looked at it closely
and said this can be my habitat: but
nestling in I
found
below the brown exterior
green mechanisms beyond the intellect
awaiting resurrection in rain: so I got up

and ran saying there is nothing lowly in the universe:
I found a beggar:
he had stumps for legs: nobody was paying
him any attention: everybody went on by:
I nestled in and found his life:
there, love shook his body like a devastation:
I said
though I have looked everywhere
I can find nothing lowly
in the universe:

I whirled though transfigurations up and down,
transfigurations of size and shape and place:

at one sudden point came still,
stood in wonder:
moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent
with being!